


tidal wave

by sonatine



Series: inclement weather [3]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, navigating memories, past and future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 15:57:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7368031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonatine/pseuds/sonatine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is sixteen and thinking about Bucky, idly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tidal wave

a memory:

Steve is sixteen and thinking about Bucky, idly.

They've been in the periphery of each other’s lives since elementary school, in the way that you know someone’s name and face and that they sat two rows back from you in second grade and that one time in sixth grade you were on the same kickball team during P.E. when that lightning struck a kid.

But Steve didn't really know him until that fall. He was sitting alone at lunch one day, as usual, when the redheaded girl in his history class up and sat across from him. Like it was a normal occurrence to be seen socially with Steve Rogers.

He knew, the way everyone in high school knows all the standard gossip, somehow, that she had just emigrated from Russia, like properly raised in St. Petersburg, and now was living with her grandmother only a few streets away from the school.

She was legit. She smoked cigarettes: not like a teen desperately trying to look cool, but with a world-weary air and the expression of a weathered sailor.

Steve was, frankly, terrified of her.

She gestured to his fries. “You going to finish those?”

Her accent was still pronounced and it took Steve a minute to decipher through it. “Have ’em.”

“Cool,” she said, and waved someone over, and then Bucky Barnes was sliding into the seat next to her. Steve’s mouth went dry.

He knew of Bucky Barnes. Everyone did. Charming and clever and good with his hands: he built all the drama sets single-handedly and did repairs around the school, super illegally, while chatting spiritedly in Spanish with the union crew.

He was also gay, in the way that everyone knew but nobody overtly said. This was 2005 and it was _okay to be gay,_ nominally, in the defiant way that allegedly open-minded straight people assured each other—but it wasn't really an everyday thing yet.

You rarely saw gay couples holding hands in hallways or kissing against lockers: that was all done furtively in dark corners or bathrooms. You never saw lesbian couples. Bisexual, trans, and nonbinary were terms Steve never even heard until his mid-twenties.

There were all sorts of stories surrounding Bucky regarding his sexuality. He’d supposedly kissed a guy at the last school dance. He’d supposedly hooked up with a guy in the empty auditorium. He’d supposedly given a blow job in the backseat of car in the parking lot at dismissal time.

All of these both could and could not be true: Schrödinger’s gossip.

Bucky was saying something to the redhead in Russian. She laughed—the first smile Steve had seen on her face—and looked at Steve measuringly.

"How are your hands?” she asked.  
Steve choked on his water.

“Excuse me?”

“Bucky is doing the set for _West Side Story._ He needs painters with steady hands.”

“Why can't Bucky ask me himself?” Steve said, looking over to him.

Bucky grinned at him then, and Steve noticed, totally in an artist’s way, what an incredible shade of blue his eyes were.

+

Anyhow, he is walking home from Art Club and holding a handkerchief over the cut on his arm and thinking how the red of his blood is almost the color of Bucky’s lips, when he suddenly sees him leaning against a wall of a building under construction.

“Hey,” Bucky says, throwing the stub of his cigarette to the ground. “You okay?”

Not really; his heart is pounding like he's just run a mile in P.E.—but then he realizes Bucky is referring to his arm.

“Yeah, fine,” Steve says. “Just a scratch.”

Bucky raises an unimpressed eyebrow. “I can scrounge you up a bandage, if you want.”

“I said it's good,” Steve snaps.

“Okay, geez.” Bucky digs a lighter and pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offers Steve one.

“Asthma.”

“Oh shit,” Bucky says sympathetically, lighting up. He’s in his standard black jeans, t-shirt, and work boots, and looks 100% like a supermodel. Steve can't figure out what he's doing here.

“Dad’s on site,” Bucky says. “I'm on break.”

“You're allowed to work? Under eighteen?”

“As long as I don't get paid,” Bucky grins. “Could use some help actually. What are you doing right now?”

“Nothing,” Steve says truthfully; his mom won't be home until late and he doesn't feel like sitting in the empty apartment.

“Cool, I could use some steady hands.” Bucky stomps out this cigarette too and guides Steve through the construction site, hand gentle and warm on the small of Steve’s back.

Steve isn't sure what to make of the tingly feeling in his spine. Happiness, he supposes, that someone wants him around.

+

a memory:

Bucky turns eighteen tomorrow and is lying in bed, half-dozing, watching a shitty version of _Romeo + Juliet_ on MegaVideo and he’s almost reached the 75-minute mark. He’s idly admiring how pretty Leonardo DiCaprio is when the screen goes blank. He turns over onto his back, daydreaming lazily about shiny blond hair, blue eyes, the cupid’s bow in rosy lips, and a delicate face when he realizes that he’s not picturing DiCaprio anymore. He’s thinking of hands flecked with paint and eyelashes so thick that they cast shadows on his cheeks, and before he knows what he's doing, Bucky is reaching into his boxers and jerking himself off. He comes incredibly quickly, gasping, and the name in his mouth is _Steve._ He rolls over in bed, still twingy and tingly.

+

a memory yet to come:

Bucky and Steve are at a pop-up gallery space whose walls are filled with the work of local artists. It's an auction to benefit... something, Bucky’s forgotten, because he's just so proud that the panel selected three of Steve’s drawings.

They can't stay long, because Bucky got off work late and Steve’s shift starts soon, but this is probably a good thing.

“I remember this so clearly,” Steve says fondly, watching the muted screening of _Romeo + Juliet_ projected on the wall. “My ninth-grade English teacher played it during class and that preppy douche—what was his name? With the pukka beads? Ryan something—made a crack about Juliet being a slut name even back in Shakespearian era—”

“Directed at Juliette Wyndham?”

“Yep. I fought him in the hallway after class. Only got one black eye.”

“Your formative years disturb me,” Bucky says, and Steve shoots him a suspicious look because he is by now well acquainted with Bucky’s turned-on restraint.

“Leo DiCaprio, huh,” Steve says, looking supremely smug for someone who admitted getting off to the dance numbers in _Grease._

(“That is the gayest thing I've ever heard,” Bucky said. “And you're _bi._ ”

“So’s Travolta,” Steve shrugged.)

“It was like one of three DVDs I brought with me when I first joined the Peace Corps,” says Bucky. “Lay off. I'd just fallen out with my family. Baz Luhrman was my coping mechanism.”

Steve turns to look at him, very slowly. Bucky falters.

“You never said you were eighteen when you fell out with your family,” he says slowly. “When did you leave for the Corps?”

“Oh, you know,” Bucky mumbles. “After graduation.”

“But you turned eighteen in March. And we— that was in June…”

“Yeah,” Bucky says steadily, and he can see the gears grinding in Steve’s head.

“So you had both me and your family abandon you in the span of a couple months?”

“Uh, yeah,” says Bucky, and then: “Whoa, hey, _Stevie,_ ” because he can see Steve spiraling. “It's okay, all right? Not your fault about my family.”

Steve’s eyes are suspiciously wet. “My fault that I was an asshole.”

Bucky shrugs. “We were young. I've done shitty things too, to other people.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, “but I hurt you.”

“You did,” says Bucky.

“I never wanted to.”

“I know.”

“These things matter,” Steve says. “How can I—make it better?”

“You're doing it already. All the time. Just by being here.”

+

another memory yet to come:

“What time am I setting the alarm for?” Steve asks. He's half on the bed, stretched between his phone charger and the wall.

“Six-fifteen,” Bucky says glumly.

Steve looks at him overtop his reading glasses that he's still getting used to. Bucky digs it—it's an Indiana Jones, PhD kind of look—but Steve’s eyes are still adjusting, which results in a lot of owl head-tilts.

“You said you saw someone you knew today,” Bucky reminds him.

“Oh yeah.” Steve abandons his phone and slides into bed, turning off the lights. Bucky removes Steve’s glasses before he lays down and bends them again, depositing them on his side table. “A kid had a bad skateboarding fall. The dad was a real asshole about coming along, telling us just how we were fucking up in very specific ways—”

“And you knew him from high school?”

“Yep. Rick Oleson.”

“Which one was that,” Bucky says with a voice of gloomy resign. “The guy who tripped you down the bleachers? The guy whose girlfriend pulled your pants down in the cafeteria?” because all genders had been equal opportunity bullies to Steve.

“Nah, this was the guy who jumped me after school and called me a _faggot_ and broke two of my ribs.”

Bucky is deathly quiet for a minute. Steve props himself up on an elbow to make sure he hasn't fallen asleep.

“You never told me that.”

“Yeah?” yawns Steve. “Guess we still do have some stories the other doesn't know yet.”

“Steve.” Bucky rests his hand on Steve’s ribcage. He’s vaguely remembering seeing Steve wince while laughing or holding onto his side. “When was this?”

“Dunno. Junior year? No, wait, he failed out and had to repeat twelfth grade. So musta been senior year.”

Bucky’s quiet for a long time.  
“So not long before we hooked up,” he finally says.

“Not really,” Steve says. “Beginning of the year.”

“Babe, a few months is not a long time.”

Steve shrugs uncomfortably and changes the subject. But Bucky’s considering, for the first time, about how this would have been a fresh memory in Steve’s mind when they hooked up.

He insinuates himself into Steve’s embrace. Steve kisses the top of Bucky’s head and strokes a soothing hand down his arm.

“That guy should not have kids,” Bucky says. His chest is tightening in a familiar way that he hasn’t felt in a long time.

Steve squeezes his hand. “Yeah. Nothing we can do, though.”

“Seriously,” Bucky says, “we’d make such better parents than him. And he, what, knocks up some girl because he couldn't be bothered to use a condom and now he's in charge of some poor kid’s life?”

“Shit’s messed up,” Steve says sleepily.

Bucky rustles around in a huff. “I cannot believe that you, Steve Rogers, personal crusader against every bully, is being so blasé about this.”

“Hey,” Steve says, turning over. “What's got your goat?”

Bucky flops over on his stomach. “Dunno,” he mumbles.

Steve watches him for a moment. “We _would_ make better parents,” he says slowly.

Bucky’s gaze flicks up to his. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr link](http://sonatine.tumblr.com/post/146807017784/read-previous-part-here-a-memory-steve-is)
> 
>  
> 
> they totally do Romeo + Juliet roleplay one night. steve is extremely into it
> 
> title taken from the [FTSE song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrpOBeApmJQ)


End file.
